Germany’s secret surveillance infrastructure has been turned into art

Gallery: Germany’s secret surveillance infrastructure has been turned into art

+4

+3

+2

Mass surveillance is a tricky concept to illustrate. Images of GCHQ's doughnut-shaped building, satellites or undersea cables might come to mind, but none of these pictures really provide much insight into this secretive activity that affects us all.

Advertisement

Freier paid virtual visits to locations that have been identified as being home to surveillance infrastructure on Google Maps and downloaded the cached versions of the files for these locations. This was done to purposefully attract the attention of those working in surveillance. "If today's internet traffic might be systematically tracked, it is pretty sure that the download of these files to my computer also have been noticed by the related programs and organisations and in return might be interpreted as a an act of suspect behaviour," writes Freier on his website.

This, he points out, creates a sense of them watching him watching them.

Whenever we visit a location using an online mapping service, the default action is that the fragmented and decontextualised image files are archived and stored in the hidden system folders of our devices. These images do not represent a complete picture of a place, but instead are split up into small squares, each of which is a small square lifted from the bigger picture.

Advertisement

This provides an insight into how our data is handled by companies like Google. Visits are documented and saved in the browser cache, but then the information is broken up and stored in a nonsensical and abstract grid. It is this abstract ordering that Freier used to create his collage grids and build up pictures of surveillance locations.

Florian Freier

Freier's work forms his winning entry to the "Landscapes of Surveillance" photo contest, which encouraged photographers to use their cameras as a tool of documentation and investigation to explore the landscape of surveillance in contemporary Germany. The contest was inspired by Trevor Paglen, who has photographed secret military sites and spy satellites across the US and published them in the public domain. "'Cached Landscapes' can be translated both, as 'hidden' landscapes showing Paglen's places of surveillance, and as invisibly tracked and 'stored' data, that is accumulated on surveillance servers and our personal computers," says Freier.